1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to user interface evaluation and more particularly to systems and methods for comparing user interfaces to determine equivalent functionality.
2. Description of the Related Art
User interface designers work most comfortably with a single, concrete design, but applications are increasingly being delivered in multiple forms. For example, a desktop application may also be accessed on a mobile device, through the telephone, or through an assistive technology such as a screen reader used by people with visual impairment. Each of these access modes requires an alternate form of the user interface. It is expensive and time consuming to explicitly design multiple versions of an interface.
One solution is to use model-based design. In this case, a designer creates an abstract representation of the application's functionality and user interface, which is mapped to different concrete presentations. These concrete presentations can then be evaluated using human performance models to provide comparative metrics. However, this approach requires the designer to explicitly demonstrate the tasks of interest on each different design. Effectively, the designer is working with multiple user interfaces simultaneously, which is difficult.
Another solution is to build one interface and have it automatically or semi-automatically transformed to produce an alternate interface. Screen reader access operates in this way, interpreting a visual user interface into an auditory form that a blind user can interact with (e.g., JAWS™ Screen Reader by Freedom Scientific). However, design decisions made to improve usability of the visual interface may harm the usability in other access modes.
Designers who are unfamiliar with these modes need a way to understand the consequences of their design decisions for alternative user interfaces, without having to be experts in all possible alternative presentation modes (such as screen reader usage).